Apparently the triumphant progress to NetZero in Britland is hitting a few potholes. As reported by Powerline.
Britain is incapable of building the wind farms, solar farms and transmission networks essential to net zero, a government report has warned.
Because? Oh, because Britain can’t produce enough “high voltage cables” or “switchgear” or “transformers.” Then there’s a shortage of “design and commissioning engineers, project managers, and installation technicians.” And to top it all,
The UK lacks the ships needed to build offshore wind turbines[.]
Wot? The nation that ruled the world with the Royal Navy and spawned hundreds of naval novels from Hornblower to Aubrey & Maturin? And it can’t build ships any more? Good lord, old chap!
OK. Let me help get those Brits “sorted.” Government is capable of only two jobs. The first one is to stop ordinary life to fight a world war, and the other is to hand out freebies to its supporters.
Note that to fight a world war the government tells everyone to stop business as usual and get to work providing the sinews of war. And just to help matters it stops production of civilian cars and trucks and homes and rations gasoline and everything else it can think of. And it drafts all the young men so that they can’t slow up the Big Push by getting married and settling down to have children.
But in the case of climate change governments haven’t quite declared a world war. They have, at a moral level, but not at a direct economic level. They have waved their hands in the air over EVs and supplied their tippy-top liberal friends with EV subsidies. But ordinary people don’t want EVs. Because? Because even at this late date, Americans feel, at a deep level, that one day they might want to “see the USA in a Chevrolet” even if the Chevrolet is a 3-row Japanese SUV. And an EV can’t cut it.
Of course, then there are my Four Laws, of which the first three apply to government direction of the economy. Remember?
Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). OK, so the government is trying to direct traffic on the climate front, but the price system is getting in the way because green energy is expensive and so the market prices are saying “Don’t.” Just like President Biden.
The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). So, doing the green energy transition by direction isn’t going to work because the job is so huge that ordinary government bureaucrats — even directed by Literally Hitlers — just can’t see the size of the job or all the details that need to be figured out. That’s what the government report quoted above found out.
Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). Yes. You and I probably don’t want to know the “six ways from Sunday” that the green energy regulations are being captured by Big Green and the Climate Industrial Complex. Not to mention Ten Percent for the Big Guy from the White House to the tiniest town in the hills of West Virginia.
So, you Brits, this is not that hard. When a government tries to do anything in the economic line, it usually fails. Because the job of government is to fight wars. And that is all.
Of course, that is why the economies of the western world are in a complete mess. Because of all the wars on COVID and poverty and ignorance and bigotry. Because they are not really wars for survival against the Mongol hordes they amount to nothing more than handouts to government supporters. And so they bollix up the economy and make us all poorer.
But that just advances the day of the Great Commoner Rebellion.